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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The annual Credit Suisse report is out for 2016. Some data that are of more interest to Singapore are as follows:

2016 Average wealth of a Singaporean: US$276,885 (S$394,000)
The report also broke down this value to:
Financial wealth per adult: US$180,414
Non-financial wealth per adult: US$151,239
Debt per adult: US$54,768

My comments: The average income has rose by 1.39 % from 2015 to 2016.A large part of the average wealth actually comes from the property (in Singapore's case, it should be the HDB for most people)

2016 Median wealth of a Singaporean: US$101,386 (S$143,600)

2015 data for reference: Median US$104,094

My comments:Even though average income has rose by 1.39%, median income has fell by 2.60%!!It seems that gap between the rich and poor have yet widen again. But how is the wealth distribution now? Digging further into the report, I found this:

Wealth distribution:

Country

Adults
(thousands)

Mean
wealth of adult (USD)

Median
wealth of adult (USD)

Distribution
of adults (%) by
wealth range (USD)

under
10,000

10,000 -
100,000

100,000 –
1 million

over 1
million

Singapore

4,111

276,885

101,386

17.6

32.2

46.5

3.7

My comments:46.5% of Singaporeans fall under the 100k to 1M (USD) wealth range. The median income (101k USD) is slightly higher than the lower value of this range. With a 49.8% whose wealth is below 100k USD, the numbers here make senseA large portion (17.6%) of Singaporeans have a wealth of less than 10k

Also, I feel it would be meaningful if we can view the age breakdown for each band of wealth range. The data above do not show how long the individuals has been accumulating the wealth they are holding. But for median wealth to drop by 2.60%, it is somewhat disturbing.

Hi money-cent,I didn't see any mention of "overseas wealth" in the report. But I guess you are right. It will be hard to track these "overseas wealth". If this is included, the gap between the rich and poor will be even greater.

Hi Urug,The report is on wealth, not income. For wealth, even though average increased, the median wealth dropped. For income comparison, I think we need to drill into the statistics released by IRAS. But I don't think they contain info for annual income lesser than 20k (as the first 20k is non taxable)